Hydro Cleaner Than Coal? Maybe Not.

Implications: The World Commission on Dams Report 2000 concluded that hydro power projects are expensive; prone to significant cost and schedule overruns; rarely reach design capacity or availability; adversely impact ecosystems upstream and downstream; displace large numbers of people and provide few employment benefits; and discriminate against indigenous peoples and women.

Research undertaken over the past 10 years in Canada and Brazil provides overwhelming evidence that large tropical hydro power plants are neither environmentally friendly nor sustainable.

Evidence from these studies concludes that large tropical hydro power projects release, on a continuing basis, more CO2 into the atmosphere than an equivalent coal-fired power plant.

Analysis:

The common perception of a coal-fired power plant is that it is dirty, dusty, noisy, smelly, and polluting and responsible for the release of the greatest amount of CO2 per MWh of all types of power plant.  On the other hand, the common perception of a hydro power plant is that it is clean, cheap, reliable, environmentally friendly and sustainable, and releases no Greenhouse Gases into the atmosphere.

Based on the findings of the World Commission on Dams and research in Canada and Brazil, and the practical examples from the San Roque Dam in the Philippines, the Pak Mun and Rasi Salai Dams in Thailand, the massive 3-Gorges Dam in China, and other dams on the Mekong River, it is clear that large hydro power projects are neither environmentally nor ecollogically acceptable.

If one looks deeper into the abysmal record of tropical hydro projects (even ignoring the fact that recent research indicates without doubt that tropical hydro projects release significant quantities of GHG into the environment throughout their lives), the terrible devastation that has been wreaked on populations and ecosystems at these locations, will lead to the inescapable conclusion that large hydro power projects do not offer a clean, renewable, and ecologically-friendly alternative to fossil fuel plants.

The following findings were published in the "Cross Check Survey: Final Report" by C. Clarke, 2000, prepared as input to the World Commission on Dams Final Report 2000.  This survey reviewed 125 dams in 52 countries on 6 continents.


"(t)he information indicates that the majority of dams in the survey under-performed with respect to the achievement of intended benefits and delivery of services...  Adverse impacts on ecosystems occur frequently and a significant number of these adverse impacts are still unanticipated in the planning and decision-making...  For the dams in the Cross Check Survey that involve displacement of people, there was a systematic underestimation of the numbers of families and people physically displaced and involuntarily ressettled."